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Cannot install Windows Vista on my SATA

S

sicsicsic

Member
I have an Acer Aspire E380 and I recently came upon an issue where my OS was completely unstable and now it won't even boot, possibly due to a virus or spyware. I got the computer from a friend who said it needed fixing and that his wife also tried reinstalling windows, hopefully she didn't cause damage to it.

I opened the computer up and I see the hard drive is a hitachi SATA HDD.

My bios sees the hard drive just fine, however when I try to reinstall Windows Vista it is unable to find any hard drive. It also prompts me to load a driver to be able to find the hard drive, and if I browse I CAN BROWSE THE HARD DRIVE...?

I tried calling Acer and the computer is out of warranty, I was just advised to hit alt+F10 three times at the splash screen to bring up a boot screen which should allow me to reinstall windows from a backup partition but that doesn't work, and safe mode doesn't seem to come up either.

I'm tempted to just buy an IDE hard drive since I really don't do anything intensive outside of internet and casual gaming and though it's out dated it seems much easier to deal with than SATA.

Does this sound like an issue which calls for a hard drive replacement?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!
 
Sometimes its necessary to set your SATA controller to "compatibility mode" in the BIOS in order to do an OS install. Try that.
 
Ya I see this problem all the time, you need to go and set the SATA settings to IDE mode or something similar to that, right now it is probably in AHCI mode which requires a driver for windows to install on it, you could get the driver, I am assuming that there is an intel processor in the computer, so it will most likely be using an intel chipset get the intel chipset AHCI drivers and it should let u install.
 
Originally posted by: Jdioutkast
I am assuming that there is an intel processor in the computer, so it will most likely be using an intel chipset get the intel chipset AHCI drivers and it should let u install.
Click to expand...

It's AMD.

And jeepers, it certainly didn't take long to hose that box...it's barely out of warranty. I'm guessing part of the problem was when your friends tried to rebuild, they inadvertently deleted the recovery partition.

Anyway, back to basics. Open the box...does it have a floppy connector? If so, great! Buy a floppy drive and cable, download the (possibly proprietary) SATA drivers from Acer and put them on a disc, and hit F6 at the beginning of file copy. You're golden.

This is an MCE box, so if you don't have Premium or Ultimate, there's probably some hardware you can toss.

I hate those hidden partition recovery images...give me a recovery CD anytime.
 
You dont need to buy a floppy drive. WIth Vista you can install RAID drivers from a flash drive or CD.
 
Dog shit.

Vista has full support for AHCI built into the installer. You shouldn't need to load drivers unless it's an exotic RAID controller - and this is an Acer OEM box, so that's not a possibility. You're probably experiencing some other hardware issue.

Run Memtest etc...

~MiSfit
 
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